["Great Days"] is bare Barthelme at his best, quite inimitable, with a new kind of calm confidence, a new depth of subject, and no pictures. And, one hopes, his imitators in disarray; for it should now be clear to everybody that nobody can write a Barthelme story as well as he can.

What are the present stories about and what are they like?… Two pieces—the one about Cortés and "The Death of Edward Lear,"—have historical referents. One piece, the author says, is an objet trouvé from "Godey's Lady's Book," 1850, slightly altered by him. One, "Tales of the Swedish Army," seems like an earlier, wackier Barthelme. A number of stories impressively challenge formal problems—for example, "Concerning the Bodyguard."

The bodyguard: new fact of modern life, therefore typical Barthelme subject. An ordinary writer of fiction, imagining a bodyguard, would give him a name, a past, would...